It seemed appropriate to wait until now to release a light management game about being a mutating virus that destroys all of humanity. This is the game Prince Phillip was born to play.
The game gives you a world map and lets you look at different countries, the shading of the countries shows you how deeply infected the populations are. You simply spend evolution points earned with infections over time to buy and sell symptoms, making your disease as transmissable as possible without being too noticable and triggering a global panic. Then once you´ve gotten in to every major region, you can mutate into an extremely deadly condition that nearly wipes out humanity. A globalist aesthetic replete with a conspiracy-chic soundtrack loop gives the game a thriller feel even as you sit back and watch.
Of course, this is a fairly shallow game were it not for the psychological effects, made ever deeper now, of dealing with the collective dissonance of pandemic paranoia. Once you´ve decoupled emotions of fear and panic from the underlying mechanics of pandemics and virology, you should read some of the material describing evidence that this whole Swine Flu thing is a big scam at best, or at worst an atrocity of overruled personal sovereignty where the cure is more lethal than the problem.
(N.B.: Not to be confused with the boardgame Pandemic.)
Riiight.
Getting science news from anti-vaccine conspiracy nuts is like ignoring aviation maintenance in favor of a St. Christopher's medal.
"In mice and ferrets, CA04 and other [swine] isolates ... replicate more efficiently than a currently circulating human H1N1 virus. In addition, CA04 replicates efficiently in non-human primates, causes more severe pathological lesions in the lungs of infected mice, ferrets and non-human primates than a currently circulating human H1N1 virus, and transmits among ferrets."
(Itoh et al. "In Vitro and in vivo characterization of new swine-origin H1N1 influenza sequences" (Nature advance online publication, 13 July 2009, doi:10.1038/nature08260))
On the other hand, nice bit about the monstrous and vile Prince Phillip. But I won't call it a wash.
This has been out for a long
This has been out for a long time, it was not recently released. Pandemic has been out long enough to have it's own meme.
Also, the whole Swine Flu thing is (while a bit overreacted too) hardly a scam. To say that the site you posted is a poor source is quite an overstatement.
Swine Flu
I'd say the swine flu comment is irresponsible, except that the anti-vaccination movement is self-correcting in the sense that eventually a bunch of the unvaccinated will die and everyone will get the faith again, as has happened in cycles for hundreds of years since vaccines were discovered. (We'll always remember you, the 99th.) As the man says, I think you'll find that the whole swine flu situation is a bit more complicated than that. A more interesting discussion of the swine flu as "scam" (because risks like SARS and bird flu never materialized) can be found here:
http://www.badscience.net/2009/04/parmageddon/
Mighty_Jim, The article you
Mighty_Jim,
The article you linked to ignores that fact that SARS and bird flu didn't just not "materialize." They were dangerous diseases with a definite potential of becoming a pandemic, but quick attention to these threats meant that we were able to come up with ways to prevent or cure these diseases. To say that they simply "didn't materialize" is to ignore the ability of science to overcome disease.
Madagascar
Damn you, Madagascar!
...*ahem* In summary, see Hanlon's Razor, "Never attribute to malice that which may be adequately explained by stupidity".
Please, Someone, Think Of The Children!!!
Ahhh nothing like panic.
@99th, never people with be less permeable, more agressive, and more idiotic than when its in fear. Specially when is in fear massively.
Better to go with the trend, for example:
"Those who think or watch news about the deadly flu for more than 10 minutes per day, are cientifically more susceptible to it, and if infected, death is certain."
I believe literally
I believe literally everything I read, which I think makes me more selective than the person who doesn´t believe anything.
Sreiously though, its funny to hear talk about faith when all I´m advocating is skepticism. The notion that this thing is a scam at best is in line with the purported factual explanation, this virus supposedly originated on a pig farm and would not have come about if it weren´t for the atrocious environmental conditions in industrial food production. That we´re forced to suffer the side-effects of a business model that externalizes rare costs like this to everyone else is, in itself, a scam. But this probably deserves a whole other game design.
You're not a skeptic at all
Skepticism is not adopting a cool anti-establishment pose by accepting the conspiracy-laden ravings of the anti-vaccine fringe. It means calling for the proof and taking the answers "on no man's word." If you did that, you'd find that mainstream medicine is on solid ground, at least as far as vaccines and pandemics go (YMMV on other issues).
Your original claim was that the disease and threat of pandemic were not real, but merely a "scam" to sell vaccines (and further the New World Order and its violations of your "personal sovereignty," make you take your thorazine, etc.). Those claims are demonstrably false, and I very much doubt that you gave them any serious thought or investigation (as a skeptic should), but rather adopted them because they tangentially support your idiosyncratic views of the world economy (which, for reasons that escape me, are eternally relevant to game reviews).
Show me some links
Show me some links demonstrating said falsehoods.
Skepticism?
As a member of several skeptic organizations, I can say you are not a skeptic. The link you posted is a conspiracy minded, anti-science website. Being a skeptic isn't the same thing as being a denier, it's taking the best evidence-based science and applying it. People who don't believe terrorists crashed planes into the WTC, or that Lee Harvey didn't act alone, are not skeptics. They're True Believers in their own brands of crazy.
sheesh
you guys have some double-negative problems